Arts and Culture

An orchestra that bridges a political divide and an exhibition that is all about the nude. I’m Carolina A. Miranda, staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, with the week’s essential arts news:

WEST-EASTERN COMES WEST

The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra, which is made up of Israeli and Palestinian musicians, made its L.A. debut at Disney Hall. Times classical music critic Mark Swed describes an extraordinary event: “The state of the Middle East can be summed up as a region where no country that has supplied these incredible musicians will allow the Divan to play,...

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An orchestra that bridges a political divide and an exhibition that is all about the nude. I’m Carolina A. Miranda, staff writer at the Los Angeles Times, with the week’s essential arts news:
WEST-EASTERN COMES WEST
The West-Eastern Divan Orchestra,...

When the hammer came down at Christie's in New York on Thursday evening, it made more of a splash than a bang.
David Hockney’s 1972 painting “Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures)” had gone for just over $90 million, an auction sale record for a...

As I viewed the flags at half-staff and saw vintage airplanes flying overhead during this week’s Veterans Day observance, I wondered what Glendale was like on Nov. 11, 1918, the day World War I ended.
Thanks to the book “Glendale Area History,” I learned...

Remember when there were three brows – high, middle and low?
The schema was concocted a century ago from phrenology, an inquiry in which racialism and eugenics masqueraded as science to examine the shape and size of the human cranium as an alleged sign...

Costa Mesa’s Halecrest Park will whip up the latest edition of its annual chili cook-off Saturday.
The event will run from noon to 4 p.m. at 3107 Killybrooke Lane and feature live music, vendors and a selection of chili recipes to sample. For more...

It had been living right under my nose for nearly a decade and I’d had no idea.
The anonymous French street artist Invader is known for, among other things, being prolific. He travels the globe, surreptitiously blanketing cities with his colorful,...

“The Time Machine,” described as a collection of artists who imagined and re-created scenes from the past and future, has been announced as the theme of next summer’s 86th Pageant of the Masters in Laguna Beach.
Festival of Arts leaders elaborated on the...

A night of performance art, art by outliers and the avant-garde, and the life’s work of a Southern photographer. Here are seven exhibitions and events to check out in the coming week:
“En Cuatro Patas: Nao Bustamante, Gina Osterloh and Dorian Wood,” at...

New York-based luxury handbag resale company Rebag jumped into the Los Angeles market with two stores simultaneously — one on Brighton Way in Beverly Hills, the other a few miles away on Melrose Place in Los Angeles.
“They cater to different clients,”...

“Hallo!” A slender Frenchman in cargo pants and a hoodie pops around a corner, sprightly, at Over the Influence gallery, waving his palm in a quick half circle. He wears a black baseball cap, giant, mirrored ski goggles and a cotton neck warmer pulled...

Prepare for the invasion.
The anonymous French street artist known as “Invader” has landed in L.A. — again — and he’s armed with a bucket of cement.
Since 1999, Invader has made nine trips to L.A. (this is his 10th), each time installing his colorful...

San Francisco’s De Young Museum is currently home to the first major U.S. museum exhibition exploring Muslim modest fashion. Organized by the Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, “Contemporary Muslim Fashions” examines the nuanced, complex and diverse...

If “Arabesque”/”Charade”-era Stanley Donen had dropped acid at a history of modern art exhibition after viewing a James Bond film, the prompted reverie might resemble Eastern European animator Milorad Krstić’s voluptuously trippy, wildly original...

Vincent van Gogh is no stranger to a theater near you. More than a dozen motion pictures tell his story (1956’s “Lust For Life” starring Kirk Douglas takes pride of place), making his tortured existence perhaps the most film-friendly of artistic lives.
...

In a fortunate coincidence, three shows currently on view in L.A. engage in a rich conversation on how black people are represented in the West. At Honor Fraser, Meleko Mokgosi’s exhibition raises questions about the role of African people and artifacts...

Thanksgiving may be just around the corner, but the Betsy Lueke Creative Arts Center in Burbank is already preparing for the December holidays.
At the end of this month, the local art gallery and art school will host its annual Holiday Boutique, in...

Why do people collect things? The motivations are as varied as the objects people collect. Perhaps it’s loyalty to a sports team, for instance, or an obsessive desire to accumulate a single kind of object such as stamps. It may even be fueled by the...

There is a moment in “Cold War” from Polish director Paweł Pawlikowski that is somewhat spectacular. It’s 1957 and our heroine, Zula (Joanna Kulig), is as bored as one can be at a swank Parisian club while the love of her life, Wiktor (Tomasz Kot),...

Though the L.A. Times and Ben Is Dead were very different publications in the late ’80s and early ’90s, the founder of the latter admits she owes a bit of gratitude to the former for helping get the indie zine off the ground.
“We lost our usual...